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Elon Musk has overhauled xAI’s executive ranks after the merger of his AI start-up with SpaceX, telling staff he wants to build a factory and city on the Moon and catapult AI satellites into space.
The billionaire said the start-up had “part[ed] ways with some people” as part of a reorganisation in recent days “to improve speed of execution”.
“The structure must evolve just like any living organism,” Musk said in a post on X, adding that the company was still hiring aggressively.
His deal to combine SpaceX with xAI to create a $1.25tn company, announced last week, is central to the billionaire’s plans to launch a network of data-centre satellites to run advanced AI models from space.
The billionaire’s ambition to take the combined group public this summer has added to pressure on xAI, which needs huge amounts of capital to compete with larger rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
Musk launched the leadership review after becoming frustrated that some teams were underperforming, according to people familiar with the matter, while junior staff complained that certain executives had overpromised what could be delivered.
In an all-hands meeting on Tuesday, Musk said that he planned to launch SpaceX orbital data centres providing 100 to 200GW per year, with a path to “launching as much as a terawatt per year” of computing power.
He added that in future he also hoped to access more than a terawatt of compute by having “factories on the moon, building AI satellites and having a mass driver” — a non-rocket space catapult that to date only exists in science fiction.
“I really want to see the mass driver on the moon that is shooting AI satellites into deep space,” he said, according to a video of the meeting posted on X on Wednesday.
A single gigawatt of data centre capacity typically costs tens of billions of dollars to build and draws electricity equivalent to the output of a nuclear reactor.
xAI is trying to expand its vast “Colossus” data centre in Tennessee to 2GW of capacity.
During the meeting, Musk said that xAI was now being reorganised around four areas, before inviting the leaders of each team to showcase their achievements in a pitch to potential talent.
Since xAI was formed just 30 months ago, the small and talented team has made remarkable progress.
The future has never looked more exciting! pic.twitter.com/QZ73H2mpBj
— xAI (@xai) February 11, 2026
The four teams cover the main model that powers the Grok chatbot and voice mode; a model for writing computer code; its image and video model; and Macrohard — which focuses on making AI “agents” that can perform tasks independently.
Under the new structure, co-founders Guodong Zhang and Manuel Kroiss, will lead the video models and the coding model respectively, while co-founder and former Google DeepMind engineer Toby Pohlen will lead Macrohard. Aman Madaan will now lead Grok.
News of the restructuring comes after the FT reported on Tuesday that xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba was leaving, becoming the sixth member of the founding team to do so after Tony Wu departed on Monday.
Musk’s staff, including its executive ranks, has been known for its high churn amid regular rounds of lay-offs, and as employees suffer burnout under tough working demands and frequent controversies.
This year, xAI’s Grok has come under scrutiny from governments globally after requests for AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery of women and children flooded the platform. Last summer, xAI made changes to the chatbot after it praised Hitler and made antisemitic posts on X.
Musk on Tuesday also said the company was targeting more than 1bn daily active users on X, up from 600mn monthly active users at present.
He also insisted that X Money, its long-promised payments features, would go live to a limited external beta within a few months before being rolled out to all users. It would allow for peer-to-peer and merchant payments.
X Money is being tested internally, but has been delayed as the company has struggled to get the required licence in New York state in particular, according to people familiar with the matter.
Musk, long known for his focus on getting to Mars, said that he now wanted “a self-sustaining city on the moon” before going to Mars and the wider solar system. “Maybe we’ll meet aliens,” he added.